Soul And Spirit

At the beginning of this month I went to a Unitarian Universalist Church, not my own, to hear Thomas Moore speak about the importance of soul work.

Thomas Moore is the author of many books including Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

and more recently, A Religion of One’s Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World. He is also a Jungian Psychotherapist and lived as a Catholic Monk for 12 years.  An interesting guy to say the least.

In his talk, Mr. Moore asserted that it is vital for people to embark on both spiritual journeys and soul journeys, and it was his opinion that these two journeys were distinctive to themselves.

“Try to remember, we are whole humna beings,” he said.

He spent the remaider of his talk discussing what distinguishes soul work from spiritual work- though not in an “us” vs. “them” kind of way.

Mr. Moore defined the soul as far more than one’s biography, and actually limited to the point in which we (human beings) could ever really know or understand it.  “You can never go deep enough” to fully fathom the depth of the soul he said.

He then paradoxically added, “there is [also] something about the soul that is ordinary,” and he made comparisons with writings by classical Zen Masters who discuss an “ordinary” nature to the mind.

Mr. Moore encouraged his listeners that evening to consider soul work as something that can happen in the world.  Reflecting on his years as a Monk, he affirmed his belief that “deprivation” is not necessary or a must in both soul journeys and spiritual journeys, and in fact, “soul and deep pleasure go together, think about that.  It’s not about going crazy, it’s not about hedonism. It’s moderation.”

Mr. Moore also stressed that the language of the soul may not be the same as the language of spirit.  True to a Jungian Analyst who has a strong interest in mythology (frequently naming the Goddess Aphrodite herself), he spoke of imagery and metaphor as opposed to prose as a means to communicate the needs and wants of the soul journey. 

Giving the example of a chocolate craving, Mr. Moore suggested that perhaps this craving is not literally the soul’s desire for chocolate, but rather “more sweetness in life.”

At the end of the evening, Mr. Moore summed up his talk with this: “We all have to be poets.  You have to be a poet to your own life [so that you can] read poetically, not literally...All life is symbolic.

I left the talk with Thomas Moore with more questions than answers.   

After stopping at the grocery store to pick up a late dinner of tortellini with pesto (my soul’s favorite dish!), I drove the 45 minutes home in the dark, and the symbolism did not escape me.

As I traveled along the road  I could feel the, perhaps too rigid, spiritual paradigms that I had created for myself beginning to rearrange in my mind.

I recalled a quote by author, psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, who said in a podcast on Dharmaseed that “we must be tender with both our social security number and our buddha-nature.”

Remembering this quote led me to reflect back on a blog entry I wrote back in February of this year called: “Loving-Kindness & the Small self,” that I had coupled with a picture of the Small self as a circle inside a larger circle labled the Big Self. 

All of this left me wondering: are the Small self (or “social security number”)and the soul one in the same?  Is the Big Self (or the “buddha-nature”) and the Spirit one in the same?

And if so, do I give more space, attention and tenderness to what I perceive to be my Spirit or Big Self, thereby neglecting the vital core of my being, my soul or Small self?  Are not both valid?  Are not both true?

What would it mean to live spiritually and soulfully?  Cultivating both.  Nuturing both.

Though possibly a cop-out when my pea-sized understanding of the universe can just go no further, I decided to stop pressing the questions any further in my mind, and I decided to fall back on the ‘ol quote by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926):

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Okay Mr. Moore. Okay Mr. Rilke, I’ll hold tight for now…Living the questions until “some distant day.”

How about you? Do you have any answers?